Joined: 18 May 2005Posts: 11132Location: The Peoples Republic of California

Posted: Sun 31 Jul 2011, 04:43 Post subject:

I continue working on the links pages. I’ve made some significant updates recently. This includes data and page layout.

I’ve moved the bulky forum link pages to secondary links. I’m working on making the primary a very useful index to many sites of interest.

One of the complaints I read from time to time is about how disorganized Puppy is in terms of finding things. Often this comes with recommendations that it should be organized or that some unknown and faceless person should organize it.

I could say - easier said than done. But actually, I don’t think it can be done. I’ll try and explain some of my reasons for thinking this.

First, I address complexities with the forum. Its layout is sub-forums, topics and posts. Many of the posts contain valuable information as well as software attachments. The problem with the forum design for us is we can only see the top pages. We can navigate to a sub-forum and click next, next and next while scanning topic titles for what we want.

I’ve done this and it is slow work and hard on the eye. Hopefully, by making tables of contents for sub-forums, as I am doing, this previously slow and laborious task of clicking on next, next will be a thing of the past.

Making tables of contents of course doesn’t modify the forum, it merely helps to find things.

Thus in support of my idea that many of Puppy’s parts cannot be organized, my idea is take the disorganization and come up with organized ways of finding what we are looking for.

Another very powerful way of finding things is using search engines such as Google because the search engines have all the contents in their databases.

I wonder how many people really know how to enter search criteria. Aitch obviously does. He might want to make a howto and train the rest of us.

About off site data. I think this is one of the things people complain about. It seems too ad hoc and disorderly. Puppy parts are in so many places.

But I think, that is just how it is. Anyone can compile software, build packages, puplets and host them on their own website. This is what actually happens and there is nothing wrong at all with them doing it.

But as result, we end up with more Puppy parts and they are in diverse places. I don’t think having Puppy’s parts spread around the universe is a bad thing. Each time someone puts up a website it enhances Puppy in ways.

The problem is people may not know about the websites or where they are. Even regular users have to discover websites and resources and bookmark them.

The new user might feel overwhelmed. At least I think they could. I often wonder how people find Puppy in the first place, let alone its pieces and parts.

As far as designing the web pages I'm doing, I think to use the first page as a resource for Puppy parts and the secondary pages for forum topics.

I’m starting including resources to Puppy, Linux in general, as well as other interesting resources which are not directly related to Puppy or Linux. Such things as online magazines and reference sites.

The forum link pages are among the most impressive because of the sheer volume of links. But actually, the really time consuming aspect is locating all good independent resources. I expect this to be a work in progress for some time.

That’s it for this post. I’ve uploaded new or modified pages on July 31, 2011

Great work, Bruce. It is very useful to index the many excellent packages that do not find their way into the official repos._________________Classic Opera 12.16 browser SFS package for Precise, Slacko, Racy, Wary, Lucid, etc available here

Ooops sorry me so late to congratulate. I am known to be slow but this time I was incredibly way behind in time. But now the link is in my signature so better late than never. Hope others place it in their sigs too:)_________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forumYou cannot attach files in this forumYou can download files in this forum